CHAPTER28FreedomBrandLIKE MANY ACTIVISTS, W. E..docx

CHAPTER 28
Freedom Brand
LIKE MANY ACTIVISTS, W. E. B. Du Bois
reeled from the height of the Nazi
Holocaust of Jews and othernon-Aryans. After the
United States entered World
War II in 1942, Du Bois felt energized
by Black America’s “Double V
Campaign”: victory against racism at home,
and victory against fascism abroad.
The Double V Campaign kicked the civil
rights movement into high gear,
especially up North, and the long-awaited
comprehensive study of the Negro
financed by the Carnegie Foundation kicked it
into yet another gear, especially
down South.
In 1936, Carnegie Foundation president Frederick P.
Keppel had briefly
considered some White American scholars when
he had decided to heed
Cleveland mayor Newton Baker’s recommendation to
sponsor a study on the
“infant race.” But there was almost no
consideration of Zora Neale Hurston or
the elderstatesmen, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter
G. Woodson. Although White
assimilationists and philanthropists were taking over
the racial discourse in the

academy, they were customarily shutting out Black
scholars as being too
subjective and biased to study Black people. It
was amazing that the same
scholars and philanthropists who saw no problem with
White scholars studying
White people had all these biased complaints
when it came to Black scholars
studying Black people. But what would racist
ideasbe without contradictions.1
Carnegie officials drew up a list of only foreign
European scholars and White
officials stationed in European colonies who they
believed could complete the
study “in a wholly objective and dispassionate
way.” They ended up selecting
the Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar
Myrdal, bringing him to the
United States in 1938. With $300,000 in
Carnegie funds, Myrdal employed a
classroom of leading Black and White scholars,
including Frazier and Herskovits
—seemingly everyone except Hurston, Du Bois,
and Woodson.2
In his two-volume, nearly 1,500-page study,
published in 1944, Myrdal
shined an optimistic light on what he termed, in
his title, An American Dilemma.
He identified the racial problem as a “moral
problem,” as assimilationists long
had since the days of William Lloyd

Garrison. White Americans display an
“astonishing ignorance about the Negro,” Myrdal
wrote. Whites ignorantly
viewed Negroes as “criminal,” as having “loose
sexual morals,” as “religious,”
as having “a gift for dancing and singing,” and as
“the happy-go-lucky children
of nature.” Myrdal convinced himself—and many of
his readers—that ignorance
had produced racist ideas, and that racist ideas
had produced racist policies, and
therefore that “a greatmajority of white people in
America would be prepared to
give the Negro a substantially better deal if
they knew the facts.” W. E. B. Du
Bois probably shook his head when he read this
passage. “Americans know the
facts,” he may have thought to himself, as
he once wrote. Du Bois had been
sharing the facts for nearly fifty years, to no
avail.3
Du Bois did enjoy most of the two volumes,
including the devastating assault
on the rationales of segregationists, the
encyclopedic analysis of racial
discrimination, and the fallacy of southerners’
separate-but-equal brand. “Never
before in American history,” Du Bois admitted, had
“a scholar so completely
covered this field. The work is monumental.” E.
Franklin Frazier agreed in his
two glowing reviews. He praised Myrdal’s
“objectivity” and willingness to
describe “the Negro community for what it was—a
pathological phenomenon in

American life.”4
And yet one of Myrdal’s solutions to White racism
was still Black
assimilation. “In practically all its divergences,
American Negro culture is . . . a
distorted development, or a pathological condition,
of the general American
culture,” Myrdal surmised. “It is to the advantage
of American Negroes as
individuals and as a group to become
assimilated into American culture.” An
American Dilemma did for cultural assimilationists
what Darwin’s Origin of
Species had done for Social Darwinists, what
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had
done for abolitionists, what Samuel Morton’s Crania
Americana had done for
polygenesists, and what Robert Finley’s Thoughts on
Colonization had done for
colonizationists. The book inspired a cadre of
key politicians, lawyers, judges,
preachers, scholars, capitalists, journalists, and
activists to power up the next
generation of racist ideas and the
assimilationist wing of the civil rights
movement. To Myrdal, neither segregationist
scholars, with their
“preconceptions about the Negroes’ inherent
inferiority,” nor antiracist scholars,
who were “basically an expression of the Negro
protest,” could be objective the
way he and the new assimilationists could.5

AS WORLD WAR II neared its end in April
1945, W. E. B. Du Bois joined
representatives of fifty countries at the United
Nations Conference on
International Organization in San Francisco. He
pressed, unsuccessfully,for the
new UN Charter to become a buffer against
the political racism of colonialism.
Then, later in the year, Du Bois
attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress in
Manchester, England, and was fittingly introduced as
the “Father of Pan-
Africanism.” A sense of determination pervaded
the Fifth Congress. In
attendance were two hundred men and women, someof
whom would go on to
lead the African decolonization movements, like
Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and
Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. These delegates did not
make the politically racist
request of past Pan-African congresses of gradual
decolonization, as if Africans
were not ready to rule Africans. The antiracist
“Challenge to the Colonial
Powers” demanded immediate independence from
European colonial rule.6
The United States emerged from World War II,
looked over at the ravaged
European and East Asian worlds, and flexed its
unmatched capital, industrial
force, and military arms as the new global leader.
Only the Communist Soviet
Union seemed to stand in America’sway. The
Cold War between capitalismand
communism to win the economic and political

allegiances of decolonizing
nations, and of their markets and resources,
had begun. In March 1946, Dean
Acheson warned that the “existence of
discrimination against minority groups in
this country has an adverse effect on our
relations with other countries.”
Acheson was a source as reliable as they came.
He had headed the State
Department’s delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods
Conference, which rebuilt
the international capitalist system. President Harry S.
Truman, who took over
after Roosevelt died in 1945, listened to
Acheson’s warning that globally
circulating reports of discrimination, fanned
by the flames of Russian media
outlets, were harming US foreign policy and causing
doors to shut on American
businessmen, especially in the decolonizing non-White
nations.7
President Truman was prepared to make some
reforms, but southern
segregationists fought tooth and nail to maintain
the racial status quo.
Mississippi’s firebrand senator Theodore Bilbo, for
one, did not get the memo
from Acheson. “I call on every red-blooded white
man to use any means to keep
the niggers away from the polls,” Bilbo
said on a reelection campaign stop in
1946. Bilbo’s call to arms ignited such a
firestorm that when he won his election,
the newly elected Republican majority blocked
him from reentering the Senate

in 1947. (His southern peers preaching “states’
rights” to keep Blacks from the
polls were allowed to take their seats.) Not to be
silenced, Bilbo retired to his
estate in southern Mississippi and self-published
Take YourChoice: Separation
or Mongrelization to rally the troops against
egalitarians. “That the Negro is
inferior to the Caucasian has been proved by six
thousand years of world-wide
experimentation,” Bilbo claimed.8
Take Your Choice hit southern bookstores during
a landmark publishing
year, 1947. Howard historian John Hope
Franklin’s sweeping history of Black
folk, From Slavery to Freedom, was a milestone,
and pushed hard against the
racist version of history promoted by Bilbo
and Columbia’s fading Dunning
School. From Slavery to Freedom wasn’t wholly
antiracist, though. Franklin
began with the racist historical conception that
slavery had induced Black
inferiority. This assertion did at least counteract
Jim Crow historians’ claims of
enslavement as “a civilizing force.” But both
historical pictures were wrong and
racist—one started Black people in inferiority
before slavery, and the other
ended Black people in inferiorityafter slavery.
And Franklin cast Black women
and poor people as impotent spectators in

the Negro’s “struggle for the
realization of freedom.” Prodded by Black
feminist historians like Mary Frances
Berry, Nell Irvin Painter, Darlene Clark Hine,
and Deborah Gray White, John
Hope Franklin—and the historically male-centered
field of African American
history—spent the rest of the century trying to
correct these mistakes in
subsequent editions and books.9
As Franklin set the new course of Black (male)
historiography in 1947
(decades before Black women’s history set a
newer course), Columbia
evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and
anthropologist Ashley
Montagu set the new course of Social
Darwinism—away from eugenics. The
Ukraine-born Dobzhansky had famously joined
evolution and genetics by
defining evolution as a “change in the frequency of
an allele within a gene pool.”
The England-born Montagu had succeeded his mentor,
Franz Boas, as America’s
most eminent anthropological opponent of segregation
when Boas died in 1942.
Montagu’s Man’s MostDangerous Myth: The
Fallacy of Race topped the charts
that year, with Americans still shuddering from news of
the Holocaust. Montagu
exposed the dangerous myth of biological
racial hierarchy and shared the
antiracist concept that “all cultures must be judged
in relation to their own
history . . . and definitely not by the

arbitrary standard of any single culture.”
Montagu did not always follow his own advice,
however. In his “example of
cultural relativity,” he judged that in the past
5,000 years, while European
cultures will have advanced, “the kingdoms of
Africa have undergone
comparatively little change.”10
On June 6, 1947, these two commanding
scholars published their
groundbreaking article in the all-powerful Science
journal. “Race differences,”
Dobzhansky and Montagu wrote, “arise chiefly
because of the differential action
of natural selection on geographically separate
populations.” They rejected
eugenic ideas of fixed races, fixed racial
traits, and a fixed racial hierarchy.
Human populations (or races) were evolving,
they argued, and changing
genetically through two evolutionary processes:one
biological, one cultural. It
was not nature or nurture distinguishing humans,
but nature and nurture. This
formulation became known as the dual-evolution
theory, or the modern
evolutionary consensus. The consensus held as
evolutionary biology grew over
the course of the century. It was an area of
growth that sometimes complemented
the growth of molecular biology, particularly after
American James Watson and
Brits Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered

the structure of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953.
Segregationists and assimilationists still found ways to
adapt dual-evolution
theory to suit their ideas about Black
people. Segregationists could argue that
African populations contained the lowest
frequencies of “good” genes.
Assimilationists could argue that European
populations had created the most
complex and sophisticated societies, and were the
most culturally evolved
populations. Dobzhansky and Montagu ended up
dethroning the eugenicists in
science but enthroning new racist ideas, as
reflected in the globally reported
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Statements on Race in 1950 and 1951.11
UNESCO officials had assembled in 1950 an
international dream team of
scholars in Paris to draw up the final
rebuttal to Nazism and eugenicists
worldwide. Virtually all of the scholars, including
Montagu, Dobzhansky, E.
Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Myrdal, had expressed
assimilationist ideas—proof
that even as the scientific establishment recognized
segregationist ideasas racist,
they still ensured that assimilationism endured and
dominated the racial
discourse. While claiming that no human populations
had any biological
evolutionary achievements, these assimilationists

spoke of the “cultural
achievements” of certain human populations in
the 1950 UNESCO Race
Statement. And then, in 1951, geneticists
and physical anthropologists figured,
in their revised statement:“It is possible, though
not proved, that sometypes of
innate capacity for intellectual and emotional
responses are commoner in one
human group than in another.” Segregationist
scholars set out to prove these
innate racial differences in intelligence.12
Even before the UNESCO statements appeared on
front pages from New
York City to Paris, President Harry S. Truman
had taken the initiative to
improve race relations in the United States. Racial
reform was a vital, though
relatively unremembered facet of the “Truman
Doctrine” that he presented to
Congress on March 12, 1947. He branded the
United States the leader of the free
world and the Soviet Union the leader of
the unfree world. “The free peoples of
the world look to us for support in maintaining
their freedoms,” Truman
proclaimed. Branding itselfthe leader of the free
world opened the United States
up to criticism about its myriad unfree racial
policies (not to mention its unfree
class, gender, and sexual policies). The harsh
treatment of non-White foreigners,
the string of nasty postwar lynchings of

returning soldiers, the anti-lynching
activism of the internationally renownedartistPaul
Robeson, NAACP charges
of human rights violations before the United
Nations—suddenly these unfree
racial policies and actions became a liability.
Protectingthe freedom brand of the
United States became more important for
northern politicians than sectional
unity and securing segregationists’ votes. In
addition, exploiting foreign
resources became more important for northern tycoons
than exploiting southern
resources. Cold War considerations and burgeoning
activism suddenly forced
civil rights onto the national agenda. But, of course,
a recounting of these
economic and political considerations was not the race
relations story—or the
history—that the Truman administration wanted
consumed. Race relations, as
Gunnar Myrdal wrote, were moral problems in
need of morally based,
persuasive solutions.13
In October 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil
Rights issued its 178-page
report, To Secure These Rights. The commission
praised Myrdal’s An American
Dilemma, condemned the “moral dry rot” at the
heart of America, and
recommended civil rights legislation. “Our
domestic civil rights shortcomings
are a serious obstacle” in US foreign policy,
the commission stated, using the
now acting secretary of state DeanAcheson as a

source. But Gallop pollsters
found that only 6 percent of White Americans
thought these rights should be
secured immediately—only 6 percent, apparently,
was antiracist in 1947.14
On February 2, 1948, Truman urged Congress to
implement the
recommendations of the President’s Committee
on Civil Rights, regardless of
the lack of support among White Americans.
“[The] position of the United
States in the world today” made civil
rights “especially urgent,” Truman
stressed. The backlash was significant. One Texas
representative kicked off his
winning US Senate campaign by rallying 10,000
supporters in Austin to view
Truman’s civil rights proposals as “a farce
and a sham—an effort to set up a
police state in the guise of liberty.” Lyndon
Baines Johnson did not, however,
join the “Dixiecrats” who bolted from the
Democratic Party on account of
Truman’s civil rights agenda. The Dixiecrats
ran South Carolina’s Strom
Thurmondfor president on a segregationist platform
that read eerily like South
Africa’s apartheid Nationalist Party, which rose to
power in 1948.15
Thanks in part to the support of Black voters,
President Truman defeated

both Thurmondand the runaway favorite, Republican
Thomas E. Dewey, in the
election that year. In voting for him, Black voters
and civil rights activists were
especially pleased with Truman’s use of executive power
in 1948 to desegregate
the armed forces and the federal workforce.
Civil rights activists had other
reasons to be hopeful that year. Jackie
Robinson desegregated Major League
Baseball, and around the same time, the
National Football League and the
National Basketball Association were also
desegregated. For decades thereafter,
Black baseball, football, and basketball professionals
were routinely steered into
positions that took advantage of their so-called
natural animal-like speed and
strength (apparently, nonathletic Black folk were
not really Black).16
Civil rights activists were also pleased when
Truman’s Justice Department
filed a brief for Shelley v. Kramer. The case was
decided on May 3, 1948, with
the Supreme Court holding that the courts could
not enforce all those Whites-
only real estate covenants proliferating in
northern cities to keep out migrants
and stop housing desegregation. “The United States
has been embarrassed in the
conduct of foreign relations by acts of
discrimination taking place in this
country,” the Justice Department’s brief stated. It
was the first time the US
government had intervened in a case to

vindicate Black civil rights. It would not
be the last. Truman’s Justice Department filed similar
briefs for othersuccessful
desegregation cases in higher education during
the 1940s and early1950s, ever
reminding the justices of the foreign implications of
discrimination.17
The Shelley v. Kraemer decision was hardly
popular. In 1942, 84 percent of
White Americans told pollsters they desired
separate Black sections in their
towns. They apparently had little problem with
the overcrowded conditions in
those Black neighborhoods. But the 1948
decision did galvanize the open
housing movement—and open the floodgates of
White opposition to
desegregation—in cities all over the postwar United
States. The open housing
movement featured a motley collection of folks.
There were upwardly mobile
Blacks and antiracist housing activists struggling
for better housing options.
There were racist Blacks who hated living in
neighborhoods with inferior Black
folks and dreamed of living next to superior White
folks. And there were
assimilationists who believed that integrated
neighborhoods could facilitate
uplift suasion, improve race relations, and solve
the nation’s racial problems.
White real estate agents and speculators

exploited everyone’s racist ideas
through blockbusting—the practice of convincing
White owners to sell their
homes at a reduced price, out of the fear
that property values were on the verge
of a steepdrop due to Blacks moving in, only to
resell at above-market value to
Black buyers eager for better housing stock.
Real estate agents and speculators
easily scared White owners about the
consequences of Blacks moving in,
warning of “an immediate rise in crime and
violence . . . of vice, of prostitution,
of gambling and dope,” as Detroit’s most famous
anti-open-housing activist put
it. White neighborhoods became interracialand ended
up almost all Black, and
the changing demographics from White to Black
quickly led to worsening
conceptions of the same neighborhood. (By the end of
the twentieth century, the
opposite was occurring as Whites “gentrified” Black
urban neighborhoods.
Black neighborhoods became interracial and
eventually ended up almost all
White, with the changing demographics from Black to
White quickly leading to
improved conceptions of the same neighborhood.
Apparently, the sight of White
people marked a good neighborhood, whereas the
sight of Black people in the
same place marked a bad one, thus demonstrating
the power of racist ideas.)18
When racist ideas and policies did not keep
Blacks out, urban Whites

sometimes turned to violence in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s. However, most
urban Whites preferred “flight over fight.” Real
estate agents, speculators, and
developers benefited, selling fleeing Whites
new suburban homes. America
experienced an unprecedented postwar boom in
residential and new highway
construction as White families moved to the
suburbs and had to commute farther
to their jobs. To buy new homes, Americans
used wartime savings and the
benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It
was the most wide-ranging set of
welfare benefits ever offered by the federal
government in a single bill. More
than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s
benefits to buy a farm or start a
business; 5 million purchased new homes; and
almost 10 million went to
college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal
spending for former soldiers in this
“model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As
with the New Deal welfare
programs, however, Black veterans faced
discrimination that reduced or denied
them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal
and suburban housing
construction (in developments that found legal ways to
keep Blacks out), the GI
Bill gave birth to the White middle class and
widened the economic gap between
the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on

poor Black fiscal habits.19
While urban Black neighborhoods in postwar
America became the national
symbol of poverty and crime, the suburban White
neighborhoods,containing the
suburban White houses, wrapped by white picket
fences, lodging happy White
families, became the national symbol of prosperity
and safety. All of the
assimilationist chatter in the media, in science,
and in popular culture hardly
reined in the segregationist backlash to the open
housing movement, but it did do
wonders uniting historically oppressed European
ethnic groups in White
suburbia. Ethnic enclaves in cities transfigured
into multiethnic suburbs, the land
where the Italians, Jews, Irish, and other
non-Nordics finally received the full
privileges of Whiteness. “Neither religion nor
ethnicity separated us at school or
in the neighborhood,”remembered Karen Brodkin, a
University of California at
Los Angeles anthropologist whose Jewish family
moved to Long Island, New
York, in 1949.20
NAACP chapters lent their support to the open
housing movement. But
engaging in activism was like walking a tightrope in
postwar America. In 1950,
Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started
leading a witch hunt for
“Communists,” meaning virtually anyone critical of
the dominant ideas of the

day, such as capitalism, America’s pro-colonial
policy abroad, northern
assimilation, and southern segregation. Walter White
and his right-hand man
Roy Wilkins had to keep the NAACP’s legal
activism and uplift suasion
carefully within the status quo of anti-communism
and assimilation. “The Negro
wants change in order that he may be
brought in line with the American
standard,” Wilkins wrote in The Crisis in
December 1951. Meanwhile,
antiracists and socialists, and certainly antiracist
socialists, were being
threatened, fired, arrested, and jailed on
trumped-up charges. An eighty-two-
year-old Du Bois was arrested (and exonerated) in
1951. The US State
Department revoked Du Bois’s passport, as it
did Paul Robeson’s, and attempted
to silence the St. Louis–born Black dancer
Josephine Baker in France, all to
manage the freedom brand of the United States
abroad.21
But the StateDepartment could not stop William
Patterson, chairman of the
short-lived Civil Rights Congress, from
slipping into Geneva in 1951 and
personally delivering a petition, entitled We
Charge Genocide, to the United
Nations Committee on Human Rights. Signed
by Du Bois, Paul Robeson,
Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones (founder of
England’s first Black
newspaper), and almost one hundred others, the

petition—and documentation of
nearly five hundred brutal crimes against African
Americans in the late 1940s—
blasted the credibility of the self-identified leader
of the free world. The true
“test of the basicgoals of a foreign policy is
inherent in the manner in which a
government treats its own nationals,” the
antiracistsboomed from Switzerland to
Swaziland.22
Scurrying into damage control, the US StateDepartment
found some anti-
communist, racist, unconditionally patriotic Blacks
to go on speaking tours, such
as Max Yergan, who became an outspoken defender of
apartheid South Africa.
In 1950 or 1951, a cadre of brilliant
propagandists in what became known as the
United States Information Agency (USIA)—the
US foreign public relations
agency—drafted and circulated a pamphlet around
the world entitled The Negro
in American Life. The pamphlet acknowledged the past
failings of slavery and
racism and declared that there had been racial
reconciliation and redemption,
made possible, of course, by the power of
American democracy. These branders
of the New America ingeniously focused on the
history of racial progress (and
not the racist present) and on Black elites
(and not the Black masses) as the

standards of measurement for American race relations.
The question was not
whether America had eliminated racial disparities.
That was deemed impossible
—just as the elimination of slavery was once
deemed impossible. The question
was whether the Talented Tenth were
experiencing less discrimination today
than yesterday.“It is against this background that
the progress which the Negro
has made and the stepsstill needed for the full
solutions of his problems must be
measured,” the pamphlet read. Over the past fifty years,
therehad emerged more
Black “large landowners,” successful
businessmen, and college students.
Activism had not driven this “tremendous pace” of
racial progress, but uplift and
media suasion, The Negro in American Life
imagined, evoking the imagination
of Gunnar Myrdal. While fifty years ago, “the
majority of whites, northern and
southern, were unabashed in their estimate of
the Negro as an inferior,” the
growing “number of educated Negroes, and their
journalists and novelists, have
made the white community keenly aware of
the cruelinjustice of prejudice.” The
Negro in American Life declared to the world
that “today, there is scarcely a
community where that concept has not been
drastically modified.”
In fact, there was scarcely a community in
the early1950s where prejudice
was not fueling cruelly unjust White campaigns

against open housing,
desegregated education, equal job opportunities,
and civil rights. The Negro in
American Life displayed pictures of a desegregated
classroom and community
that few Americans would have recognized, while
admitting “much remains to
be done.” The pamphlet asked, given how bad
things were, is it not amazing
how far we’ve come? With every civil rights
victory and failure, this line of
reasoning became the standard past-future declaration
of assimilationists: we
have come a long way, and we have a ways to
go. They purposefully sidestepped
the present reality of racism.23
The Negro in American Life attempted to win
the hearts and minds—and
markets and resources—of the decolonizing non-White
world. Nothing would be
better for our interests in Asia than “racial
harmony in America,” said the US
ambassador to India, Chester Bowles, at Yale
in 1952. However, after the
illustriousWorld War II general Dwight D.
Eisenhower entered the White House
in 1953, he discontinued the Truman Doctrine
on civil rights. Racial
discrimination was not a societal problem, but a
failure of individual feelings,
Eisenhower lectured. The solution lay not in force,
but in “persuasion, honestly

pressed,” and “conscience, justly aroused,” Eisenhower
added. This pipe dream
allowed the shrewd Eisenhower to conciliate
northern readers of An American
Dilemma and southern readers of Take YourChoice.24
Before Truman left office, his Justice Department
had submitted a brief for
yet another desegregation case before the US
Supreme Court, a combined case
of five NAACP lawsuits against desegregated
schools in Kansas, South
Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC. “It is
in the context of the
present world struggle between freedom and
tyranny that the problem of race
discrimination must be viewed,” the brief stated in
support of desegregation. The
Court heard oral arguments in Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka for a
second time on December 8, 1953. At a White
House dinner, Eisenhower invited
his newly appointed chief justice, Earl Warren, and
grabbed a seat next to the
eminent lawyer defending the segregationists,
John Davis, someone the
president repeatedly praised as “a great man.”
On a stroll to the coffee table,
Eisenhower told Warren he could understand
why southerners wanted to make
sure “their sweet little girls are not required to sit
in school alongside somebig
black buck.”25
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren, in
his opinion of the Supreme

Court’s unanimous decision, somehow agreed with
the lower court’s finding that
southern schools had “been equalized, or are
being equalized.” Thus, for the
Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education
was about the psychological
impact of separate schools on Black children.
Warren found the answer in the
social science literature, the recent explosion of
studies trying to figure out why
Black people had not assimilated and why the
racial disparities still persisted.
With the slavery-deforming-Black-people theory no
longer sustainable in the
early 1950s, assimilationists conjured up the
segregation-deforming-Black-
people theory. They cited the famous doll tests of
psychologists Kenneth Clark
and Mamie Clark, as well as popular books on
the subject, such as The Mark of
Oppression (1951) by two psychoanalysts.
Discrimination and the separationof
the races, the assimilationists argued, had been
having a horrible effect on Black
personalities and self-esteem.26
In his Brown opinion, Chief Justice Warren
footnoted the famous doll tests
as evidence of the negative impact of segregation
on Black people. He felt sure
enough to write, “To separate [colored children]
from others of similar age and
qualification solely because of their race

generates a feeling of inferiority as to
their status in the community that may affect
their hearts and minds in a way
unlikely ever to be undone.” In short, “segregation
of white and colored children
in public schools has a detrimental effect
upon the colored children.” It tended to
retard their “education and mental development”
and deprived “them of someof
the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly]
integrated school system,” Warren
surmised. “We conclude that, in the field of public
education, the doctrine of
‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate
educational facilities are inherently
unequal.”27
Warren essentially offered a racist opinion in
this landmark case: separate
Black educational facilities were inherently unequal
and inferior because Black
students were not being exposed to White
students. Warren’s assimilationist
problem led to an assimilationist solution over the
next decade to desegregate
American schools: the forced busing of children
from Black schools to
inherently superior White schools. Rarely were White
children bused to Black
schools. By the 1970s, segregationist White parents
from Boston to Los Angeles
were opposing forced busing, spitting on reformers
all types of racist vitriol,
while antiracist Black parents were demanding
two-way busing or the
reallocation of resources from the over-resourced

White schools to the under-
resourced Black schools. These antiracist plans
were opposed by both
assimilationists and segregationists, who seemed to
assume, like the Court, that
majority-Black schools could never be equal to
majority-White schools.
Not many Americans immediately recognized
the assimilationist reasoning
behind the Brown decision. But Zora Neale
Hurston did. She was then sixty-four
and living in Florida, and she was as sharp as
ever despite her recent literary
descent. “If there are not adequate Negro schools
in Florida, and there is some
residual, someinherent and unchangeable quality in
white schools, impossible to
duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to
insist that Negro children of
Florida be allowed to share this boon,” wrote
Hurston in the Orlando Sentinel.
“But if there are adequate Negro schools and
prepared instructors and
instructions, then thereis nothing different except
the presence of white people.
For this reason, I regard the ruling of the
U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather
than honoring my race.” Calling out civil rights
leaders, she framed it a
contradiction in terms to scream race prideand
equality while at the same time
spurning “Negro teachers and self-association.”

Hurston’s widely reprinted letter
was praised by segregationists and antiracists,
but sparked only ire from
assimilationists.28
Despite its basisin racist reasoning, for many—
and of course many did not
actually read Warren’s opinion—the effect of the
landmark decision overturning
Plessy v. Ferguson honored Black people. “I
have seen the impossible happen,”
wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. USIA
propagandists were as elated as Black folk.
Within an hour of the announcement, the Voice of
America broadcast the news
to Eastern Europe. Press releases were drawn
up in multiple languages. The
decision “falls appropriately within the Eisenhower
Administration’s many-
frontal attack on global communism,” the
Republican National Committee had
to state on May 21, 1954, sinceEisenhower refused
to endorse Brown.
In the Jim Crow South, Mississippi senator
James Eastland vowed—rallying
the troops—that the South “willnot abide by or
obey this legislative decision by
a political court.” And the segregationist resistance
cameso fast and so strong
that when it cametime for the Supreme Court to
implement the Brown decision
in 1955, for the first time in US history, the
Court ended up vindicating a
constitutional right and then “deferr[ing] its
exercise for a more convenient

time,” sending Du Bois and other activists
into a rage. Still, southern
segregationists closed ranks and organized
“massive resistance” through
violence and racist ideas. Apparently, they cared
more about defending their
separate-but-equal brand before America than
defending the American-freedom
brand before the world.29
CHAPTER 29
Massive Resistance
THE MOST NOTORIOUS victim of what was to
be called “massive resistance” to
desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on
August 28, 1955. For
hissing at a Mississippi White woman,
hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his
face was unrecognizable during his open casket
funeral in his native Chicago.
The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged
Black world. On March
12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven
House representatives signed
a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v. Board
of Education decision for
planting “hatred and suspicion where there has
been heretofore friendship and
understanding.” The Klan fielded new members,
and elite segregationists
founded White citizens councils. Southern schools
ensured that their textbooks

gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C.
Vann Woodward called them,
that read like Gone with the Wind.
But the civil rights movementkept coming. W. E. B.
Du Bois was stunned
watching the unfolding Montgomery Bus Boycott during
the 1956 election year.
It was not the boycott’s initial mobilizer,Alabama
State College professor Jo
Ann Robinson, nor the boycott’s drivers, those
walking Black female domestics,
who surprised him. Any serious history student of
Black activism knew that
Black women were regularly driving forces. Du
Bois was stunned by the twenty-
seven-year-old figurehead of the boycott. A Baptist
preacher as a radical
activist? Du Bois had never thought his eighty-eight-
year-old eyes would see a
preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois sent a
message of encouragement,
and King sent a grateful reply. King had
read Du Bois’s books, and he later
characterized him as “an intellectual giant” who
saw through the “poisonous fog
of lies that depicted [Black people] as inferior.”
Du Bois also sent a
proclamation to the Indian journal Gandhi Marg.
King—in his strident
commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience—could
be the American Mahatma
Gandhi.1
King’s other favorite scholar penned the most
controversial Black book of

1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender
racism of E. Franklin Frazier in
Black Bourgeoisie, depicting White women as
more beautiful and sophisticated
than Black women, Black wives as
domineering, and Black husbands as
“impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as
his historical racism.
“Slavery was a crueland barbaric system that
annihilated the negro as a person,”
Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis
of historian Stanley Elkins in
his smash hit Slavery: A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life
(1959). And yet Frazier had overcome his cultural
racism. The popular social
science literature about the psychological effects of
discrimination that molded
the Brown decision had remolded Frazier’s old ideas
of assimilation as
psychological progress, and he now believed in
assimilation as regression. No
group of Black people held more firmly to
assimilationist ideas, Frazier argued,
than the Black bourgeoisie, who tried to “slough
off everything . . . reminiscent
of its Negro origin.”2
Frazier sounded like the ministers of Elijah
Muhammad’s quickly growing
Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) in the
late 1950s. “They won’t let you be
White and you don’t want to be Black,” the

son of Garveyites, former convict,
and the NOI’s new Harlem minister likedto say.
“You don’t want to be African
and you can’t be an American. . . . You in
bad shape!” CBS’s MikeWallace
brought Malcolm X and the NOI to the attention of
millions in the 1959
sensational five-part television series entitled
The Hate That Hate Produced: A
Study of the Rise of Black Racism and Black
Supremacy. Elijah Muhammad and
his ministers opposed assimilationists; instead, they
preached racial separation
(not Black supremacy), arguing that Whites were
an inferior race of devils.
Ironically, Black and White assimilationists,
clothed in racism and hate for
everything Black, condemned the Nation of
Islam for donning racism and hate
for everything White.3
In Black Bourgeoisie, Frazier delivered the most
withering attack on the
Black middle class in the history of
American letters, commercializing a new
class racism: the Black bourgeoisie as inferior to
the White bourgeoisie, as more
socially irresponsible, as bigger conspicuous
consumers, as more politically
corrupt, as more exploitative, and as sillier in
their “politics of respectability,”to
use historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s recent
term. Despite, or rather
because of, Frazier’s overreach into class
racism, Black Bourgeoisie had a
significant effect on the civil rights

movement, galvanizing Martin Luther
King’s generation of middle-class youngsters to
break awayfrom what Frazier
termed their apathetic “world of make-believe.”4
And this powerful forceof youthful courage, growing
more powerful by the
day, was needed to resist the segregationist
massive resistance that seemed to
growmore massive with each passing day. Segregationists
had stripped the Civil
Rights Act of 1957 of its enforcement powers,
making it practically a dead letter
when it passed on August 29, 1957. On
September 4, Arkansas governor Orval
Faubus deployed the National Guard to block
the Little Rock Nine from
desegregating Central High School, defying a
federal court order. With the
globally circulating sights and sounds of
government troops defending howling
segregationist mobs, Little Rockharmed the
American freedom brand.
“Our enemies are gloating over this incident,”
Eisenhower wailed in a
nationally televised speech, “and using it everywhere
to misrepresent our whole
nation.” Eisenhower and his aides agonized for
two weeks, seeking solutions
that could keep both his political image in the
South and the American image
abroad intact, to no avail. On September

24, in a decision he later regarded as
“the most repugnant act in all his eightyears in
the White House,” Eisenhower
sent in federal troops to protect the Little
Rock students as they entered the
school. Some civil rights activists recognized
the incredible power Cold War
calculations had given them to embarrass
America into desegregation. Still
others believed and hoped that Gunnar Myrdal’s
dictum was coming true: that
the civil rights movementwas persuading awayracist
ideas.5
A NINETY-YEAR-OLD DU BOIS was hopeful,
too, in another way. “Today, the United
States is fighting world progress, progress which
must be towards socialism and
against colonialism,” he said, speaking to seven
hundred students and faculty at
Howard University in April 1958. Later in
the year, having gotten his passport
back, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet
Union, and Communist China,
where he happily met Chairman Mao Tse-tung. When
Mao started musing about
the “diseased psychology” of African Americans,
showing that he was attuned to
the latest racist social science, Du Bois
interjected. Blacks were not diseased
psychologically; they lacked incomes, Du Bois
explained, inciting a debate and a
fusillade of questions from Mao.When Du Bois
expressed someof his failures
as an activist, Mao interjected. Activists only failed
when they stopped

struggling. “This, I gather,” Mao said, “you have
never done.”6
Martin Luther King Jr. had not stopped struggling,
either. But Du Bois had
soured on King, deciding in late 1959 that he
was not the American Gandhi after
all. “Gandhi submitted [to nonviolence], but he
also followed a positive
[economic] program to offset his negative refusal
to use violence,”Du Bois said.
At the time, Black critics were soundly
blitzing King’s philosophy of
nonviolence, but somewere also taking the civil rights
movementfigurehead to
task on someof his lingering racist ideas. In
1957, King received a letter for his
“Advice for the Living” column in Ebony
magazine. “Why did God make Jesus
white, when the majority of peoples in the
world are non-white?” Jesus “would
have been no more significant if His skin had been
black,” King responded. “He
is no less significant because his skin was
white.” The nation’s most famous
Black preacher and activist prayed to a White
Jesus? A “disturbed” reader ripped
off a letter to Ebony. “I believe, as you
do, that skin color shouldn’t be
important, but I don’t believe Jesus was
white,” the reader stated. “What is the
basisfor your assumption that he was?” With only a
basisin racist ideas, King

did not respond.7
Du Bois and King had not let up on the pedal of
struggle, and neither had
college students. Four freshman at North
Carolina A&T trotted into a
Woolworths in Greensboro on February 1, 1960.
They sat down at its restricted
counter and remained until the store closed. Within
days, hundreds of students
from area colleges and high schools were “sitting
in.” News reports of these
nonviolent sit-ins flashed on screens nationally,
setting off a sit-in wave to
desegregate southern businesses. “Students at
last to the rescue,” rejoiced Du
Bois, urging them on. By April, students
were staging sit-ins in seventy-eight
southern and border communities, and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) had been established.8
If civil rights activists hoped that the
attention they received would sway
presidential candidates, they were disappointed.
The Democratic nominee for
president, a dashing Massachusetts senator, said as
little about civil rights as
possible, both on the campaign trail and in the first-
ever televised presidential
debates. John F. Kennedy excited activists by
supporting the Democrats’ civil
rights plank, but disappointed them by
naming a suspected opponent of civil
rights, Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson, as
his running mate.

Kennedy and his GOP opponent, Richard Nixon, both
tried not to take sides.
The civil rights and massive resistance movements
were stirring debates in many
forums, including the scholarly and artistic
communities, which in turned further
stirred the civil rights and the resistance movements.
An airline reservation agent
in New York, who wrote fiction in her
spare time, touched a chord among
activists and sympathizers of the civil rights
movementwith a brilliantly crafted
novel. Harper Lee did not expect the storyof a
young girl coming to terms with
race relations in the South to become an instant
and perennial best seller, or to
win the Pulitzer Prizefor Fiction in 1961. To
Kill a Mockingbird—abouta White
lawyer successfully defending a Black man
wrongly accused of raping a White
woman—became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of
the civil rights movement, rousing
millions of readers for the racial struggle
through the amazing power of racist
ideas. The novel’s most famous homily, hailed
for its antiracism, in fact
signified the novel’s underlying racism.
“‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thingbut
make music for us to enjoy,” a neighbor
tells the lawyer’s strong-willed
daughter, Scout. “That’s why it’s a sin to kill a
mockingbird.” The mockingbird

is a metaphor for African Americans. Though
the novel was set in the 1930s, the
teeming Black activism of that era was absent
from To Kill a Mockingbird.
African Americans come across as spectators,
waiting and hoping and singing
for a White savior, and thankful for the moral
heroism of lawyer Atticus Finch.
There had been no more popular racist relic of
the enslavement period than the
notion that Black people must rely on Whites to
bring them their freedom.9
Civil rights activists waging sit-ins were hardly
waiting on White saviors.
Then again, many of these students were
expecting their noble campaigns of
nonviolent resistance to touch the moral
conscience of White Americans, who in
turn would save southern Blacks from
segregationist policies. That strategy
sapped W. E. B. Du Bois’s pleasure with the
civil rights movement. And
activists desegregating southern businesses that low-
income Blacks could hardly
afford did not seem like racial progress to
Du Bois, who refused to measure
racial progress by the gains of Black elites.
Du Bois had been waiting for a
political-economic program to arise. He had been
waiting for something like
scholar Michael Harrington’s shocking anti-poverty
best seller in 1962, The
Other America. “A wall of prejudice is erected to
keep the Negroes out of
advancement,” Harrington wrote. “The more

education a Negro has, the more
economic discrimination he faces.” Harrington used
statistics to showthat uplift
suasion did not work. Moreover,he pointed out
that “the laws against colorcan
be removed, but that will leave the poverty that is
the historic and
institutionalized consequence of color.” By the
time Harrington tossed a war on
poverty onto the Democrats’ agenda, Du Bois had
left the country.10
On February 15, 1961, a few days shortof his
ninety-third birthday, Du Bois
received a note from President Kwame Nkrumah
informing him that the Ghana
Academy of Learning would financially support
his long-desired Encyclopedia
Africana. By the year’s end, Du Bois had arrived in
Ghana. But within a few
months, he suffered a prostrate infection. Nkrumah
later came to Du Bois’s
home for his ninety-fourth birthday dinner in
1962. When Nkrumah rose to
depart, Du Bois reached for the president’s hand
and warmly thanked him for
making a way for him to end his years on
African soil. Du Bois turned somber.
“I failed you—my strength gave out before I
could carryout our plans for the
encyclopedia. Forgive an old man,” said Du Bois.
Nkrumah refused. Du Bois
insisted. Du Bois’s smile broke the somber

silence, and Nkrumah departed in
tears.11
IT WAS LEADERS of decolonized nations
like Kwame Nkrumah, who were friendly
to the Soviet Union and critical of American
capitalism and racism, that US
diplomats were trying to attract (if not
undermine). But the viciously violent
southern response to civil rights protests was
embarrassing the United States
around the non-White world. In 1961,
President John F. Kennedy tried to shift
the movement’s energy from the humiliating
direct-action protests to voter
registration. He also established the Peace Corps,
reportedlyto “show skeptical
observers from the new nations that Americans
were not monsters.” Northern
universities were trying to showthat they were not
monsters, either, by gradually
opening their doors to Black students. Down
south, the Kennedy administration
sent in troops to desegregate the University of
Mississippi, receiving applause
from the international community that was not lost on
JFK.12
MOST AMERICANS DID not consider assimilationists
to be racists. They did not
consider northern segregation and racial disparities
to be indicative of racist
policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for
jobs, housing, education, and
justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly
changed their views on the

matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and
American history remained on the
supposedly really racist region, the South.
On January 14, 1963, George Wallace
was inaugurated as the forty-fifth governor of
Alabama. He had opposed the
Klan as a politician and judge until he had lost to
the Klan-endorsed candidate in
the 1958 gubernatorial election. “Well boys,”
Wallace said to supporters after
the defeat, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever
outnigger me again.” Wallace
joined the secret fraternity of ambitious
politicians who adopted the popular
racist rhetoric that they probably did not believe in
private.13
The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, the major
television stations, and a
host of othermedia outlets cameto cover what
reporters expected to be a nastily
polarizing speech. George Wallace did not disappoint,
showing off his new
public ideology. “It is very appropriate that from
this cradle of the Confederacy,
this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon
Southland, that today we sound the
drumfor freedom as have our generations of
forebears before us time and again
down through history,” he said. He was
sounding one of the two timeworn
American freedom drums: not the one calling for
freedom from oppression, but

the one demanding freedom to oppress. “In the
name of the greatest people that
have ever trod this earth,” he intoned, “ . . .
I say segregation now, segregation
tomorrow,segregation forever.”14
Wallace became the face of American racism, when
he should have been
rendered only as the face of segregation. Harper
Lee should have reigned as the
face of assimilation in the literary world, while
sociologists Nathan Glazer and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan should have reigned as
the facesof assimilation in the
scholarly world. In 1963, they published their
best-selling book, Beyond the
Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews,
Italians, and Irish of New York
City. Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Oscar
Handlin, in his New York
Times review of the book, hailed its
treatment of Negroes as an “excellent” and
“much-needed corrective to many loose
generalizations.” This assessment
typified the wild affirmations the book received from
northern academics.15
Native New Yorkers trained in postwar
assimilationist social science, Glazer
and Moynihan met one another while working in
the Kennedy administration on
poverty issues. Beyond the Melting Pot propagated
a ladder of ethnic racism—
that is, a hierarchy of ethnic groups within
the racial hierarchy—situating the
hard-working and intelligentJews over the Irish,

Italians, and Puerto Ricans, and
West Indian migrants over the “Southern Negro”
because of West Indians’
emphasis on “saving, hardwork, investment, [and]
education.” Glazer penned
the chapter on the Negro, saying that “the period
of protest” must be succeeded
by “a period of self-examination and self-help.”
He claimed that “prejudice, low
income, [and] poor education only explain so
much” about “the problems that
afflict so many Negroes.” As an assimilationist,
Glazer, citing Frazier, attributed
the problems to both discrimination and Black
inferiority, particularly the
“weak” Black family, the “most serious
heritage” of slavery. From historical
racism, Glazer turned to the class racism of
Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Unlike
the othermiddle classes, “the Negro middle class
contributes very little . . . to
the solution of Negro social problems,” he
wrote. And from historical racism and
class racism, he turned to cultural racism and
political racism to explain why
problems persisted in the Black community. “The
Negro,” he said, “is only an
American,and nothing else. He has no values and
culture to guard and protect.”
He criticized the Negro for insisting “that the white
world deal with his problems
because, he is so much the product of
America.”In Glazer’s vividimagination,

the Negro insisted that “they are not his
problems, but everyone’s.” And this, he
said, was “the key to much in the Negro world,”
that Blacks were not taking
enough responsibility for their own problems.16
Ironically, the actual “key to much in the
Negro world” may have been the
very opposite of Glazer’s formulation—the Negro
may have been taking too
much responsibility for the Negro’s problems, and
therefore not doing enough to
forcethe “white world” to end the discriminatory
sources of the problems. Elite
Blacks, raised on the strategy of uplift suasion
and its racist conviction that every
Negro represented the race—and therefore that
the behavior of every single
Black person was partially (or totally) responsible
for racist ideas—had long
policed each other. They had also policed the masses
and the media portrayals of
Blacks in their efforts to ensure that every
single Black person presented herself
or himself admirably before White Americans.
They operated on the assumption
that every single action before White
America either confirmed or defied
stereotypes, either helped or harmed the Negro
race.
Beyond the Melting Pot saluted the leadershipof
the National Urban League,
the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) for their lobbying and
legal activism. Glazer and Moynihan neither saluted

nor mentioned the many
local groups that were fiercely confronting
segregationists in the streets in 1963.
Nor did they mention the youngsters of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee in Mississippi, Malcolm X in
Harlem, or Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a
spate of demonstrations in
Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s
ruggedly segregationist police
chief, “Bull” Conner. Nine days later,
on Good Friday, eight White anti-
segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public
statement requesting that
these“unwise and untimely” street demonstrations cease
and be “pressed in the
courts.” Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same
day, read the statement from his
cell. Incited, he started doing somethinghe rarely
did. He responded to critics in
his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,”
published far and wide that summer.
King attacked not only those Alabama preachers,
but also the applauding
audience of Beyond the Melting Pot. He confessed
that he had “almost reached
the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great
stumbling block in his stride
toward freedom” was not the segregationist, “but the
white moderate . . . who
constantlysays:‘I agree with you in the goal you
seek,but I cannot agree with

your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically
believes he can set the
timetable for another man’s freedom.” King explained
that “injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere.”17
No one knows whether the sickly W. E. B.
Du Bois read King’s jailhouse
letter. But just as Du Bois had done in 1903,
and later regretted, in his letter
King erroneously conflated two opposing groups: the
antiracistswho hated racial
discrimination, and the Black separatists who hated
White people (in groups like
the Nation of Islam). King later distanced
himself from both, speaking to a
growing split within the civil rights movement.
More and more battle-worn
young activists had grown critical of King’s
nonviolence and disliked the pains
he took to persuade awaythe racist ideasof Whites.
More and more, they were
listening to Malcolm X’s sermons about self-defense,
about persuading awaythe
assimilationist ideasof Blacks, about mobilizing
antiraciststo forcechange. On
May 3, 1963, theseyoung people watched on
television as Bull Connor’s vicious
bloodhounds ripped the children and teenagers of
Black Birmingham to pieces;
as his fire hoses broke limbs, blew clothes
off bodies, and slammed bodies into
storefronts; and as his officers clubbed marchers
with nightsticks.

The world watched, too, and the United States
Information Agency reported
back to Washington about the “growing adverse
local reactions” around the
world to the “damaging pictures of dogs and
fire hoses.” Kennedy met with his
top advisers to discuss this “matter of national
and international concern.”He
dispatched an aide, Burke Marshall, to
Birmingham to help negotiate the
desegregation accord that stopped the protests.
Kennedy also sent soldiers to
ensure safety for the desegregation of the
University of Alabama on May 21,
1963. Governor George Wallace put on a show
for his voters, standing in the
schoolhouse door, admonishing the “unwelcome,
unwanted and force-induced
intrusion . . . of the central government.”
State Department officials had to put in overtime
when agitated African
leaders critical of the United States met in
Ethiopia on May 22, 1963, to form the
Organization of African Unity. Secretary of State
DeanRusk sent out a circular
to American diplomats assuring them that Kennedy was
“keenly aware of [the]
impact of [the] domestic race problem on [the]
US image overseas and on
achievement [of] US foreign policy objectives.”
Rusk said Kennedy would take
“decisive action.”
On June 11, John F. Kennedy addressed the nation—or
the world, rather—

and summoned Congress to pass civil rights
legislation. “Today we are
committed to a worldwide struggle to
promote and protect the rights of all who
wish to be free,” Kennedy said. “We preach
freedom around the world, and we
mean it.” The eyes of the nation and the world
turned to Washington’s
legislators, who kept their eyes on the world. When
the new civil rights bill came
before the Senate Commerce Committee,
Kennedy asked Secretary of State
Rusk to lead off the discussion. Racial
discrimination had “had a profound
impact on the world’s view of the United States
and, therefore, on our foreign
relations,” testified Rusk. Non-White newly
independent peoples were
“determined,” he said, “to eradicate every vestige
of the notion that the white
race is superior or entitled to special privileges
because of race.” By August
1963, 78 percent of White Americans
believed that racial discrimination had
harmed the US reputation abroad. But not many
inside (or outside) of the
Kennedy administration were willing to admit that
the growing groundswell of
support in Washington for strong civil rights
legislation had more to do with
winning the Cold War in Africa and Asia than with
helping African Americans.
Southern segregationists cited those foreign

interests in their opposition. South
Carolina senator Strom Thurmond refused “to act on
some particular measure,
because of the threat of Communist propaganda
if we don’t,” as he fired at
Rusk.18
Kennedy’s introduction of civil rights legislation
did not stop the momentum
of the long-awaited March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom. Though it had
been organized by civil rights groups, the Kennedy
administration controlled the
event, ruling out civil disobedience. Kennedy
aides approved the speakers and
speeches, a lineup that did not include a single
Black woman, or James Baldwin
or Malcolm X. On August 28, approximately
250,000 activists and reporters
from around the world marched to the area
between the Lincoln Memorial and
the Washington Monument. Before Kennedy
officials happily read the USIA’s
report saying that numerous foreign newspapers
contrasted the opportunity to
march that had been “granted by a free society”
with “the despotic suppression
practiced by the USSR,” and before King ended
the round of approved speeches
with his rousing and indelible antiracist dream of
children one day living “in a
nation where they will not be judged by the
colorof their skin, but by the content
of their character,” and before Mahalia Jackson
sang into the blazing throng of
approved placards and television cameras, the

NAACP’s Roy Wilkins cameas
the bearer of sad news.
W. E. B. Du Bois had died in his sleepthe
previous day in Ghana, Wilkins
announced. “Regardless of the fact that in his
later years Dr. Du Bois chose
another path,” Wilkins intoned, “it is
incontrovertible that at the dawn of the
twentieth century his was the voice calling you to
gather here today in this
cause.” The well-trained journalist at the helm of
the NAACP reported the truth.
Indeed, the younger Du Bois had called for such
a gathering, hoping it would
persuade and endear millions to the lowly soulsof
Black folk. And yes, the older
Du Bois had chosen another path—the antiracist
path less traveled—toward
forcing millions to accept the equal soulsof
Black folk. It was the path of civil
disobedience that the young marchers in the SNCC
and CORE had desired for
the March on Washington, a path a young
woman from Birmingham’s Dynamite
Hill was already marching upon and would never
leave. Roy Wilkins did not
dwell on the different paths. Looking out at
the lively March on Washington, he
solemnly asked for a moment of silence to
honor the ninety-five-year movement
of a man.19

CHAPTER28FreedomBrandLIKE MANY ACTIVISTS, W. E..docx

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